Maria Menounos teared up while retelling the story of how she told her best friend she had pancreatic cancer.
Menounos, who was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor in 2017, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in January 2023. She underwent surgery the following month to have the mass, a fibroid, her spleen, part of her pancreas and 17 lymph nodes removed. Since the cancer had not spread, she was spared further treatment, and she is now cancer-free.
Before she found out this news, Menounos didn't know what her future would look like and was already preparing to say goodbye to her friends and family.
During an appearance on the Off the Vine with Kaitlyn Bristowe podcast, the TV personality discussed her cancer diagnosis and teared up when she explained what happened when she broke the news to her friend.
Newsweek reached out to a spokesperson for Menounos via email for comment.
"It was me, my doctor, and [my husband] in an empty office in the middle of the night just all bawling in the hallway and 'cause my doctor, I met him, and we discovered the brain tumor and, so now he's gone through that with me, he's gone through my mom's cancer—this one's like about to cry over here," Menounos said as she teared up and pointed to someone off-screen.
"So my best friend's in the room. Um, we both broke the news that we had cancer to each other at the same time. Neither of us knew we had cancer, and we got on the phone, she's like, 'Can we talk tonight?'...and I go, 'Yeah, I have something I need to share too.'"
"And she calls up she's like, 'So I have breast cancer,' and so I let her like, say everything—we've been best friends since we were 13—and so she gives me her news, and then I wait, and then I go, 'Well not to trump you but I got pancreas cancer, and I might not be around much longer.'"
As Menounos wiped away a tear, she added: "Yeah, it was a crazy call."
Menounos' friend confirmed she was now a breast cancer survivor when asked by host Bristowe, which Bristowe applauded.
"Yeah, she's doing great, thank God," Menounos said.
Elsewhere in the interview, Menounos shared what it was like when she first received her diagnosis.
"I was terrified...I was in pain," she said before going on to explain she went to Prenuvo, an establishment that provides whole-body, radiation-free MRI scans.
"They found it, but [my doctor] hadn't even found it. So he was so focused on the brain tumor 'cause when I got out of the scan, I said, 'Hey, I just want to give you a heads up. I don't want you to freak out and think you have to give me brain tumor news. I have a brain tumor in there. There's still left from surgery that he couldn't get, and so he's going down the scan he's talking about the brain tumor," Menounos explained.
The TV host told Bristowe that as the radiologist was scanning down her body, she was thinking she was going to "get off free."
"And then he goes, 'Oh, what's that?' so like, the radiologist is going through the report with you, but he had already done the report and not seen it, and he's like, 'Wait,' and he's going through these images and I'm like, 'What the F,'" she said.
Menounos explained that the radiologist told her that there was a large mass on her pancreas, which was present in every shot. She was told that because of this, she needed to go to the hospital "right away."
"And I think my eyes kind of watered a little, and he was white as a ghost, and he was like really, really nervous," Menounos said. "And my first thing was I texted my doctor, and I said 'I need to get in right away.'"
"And then after that, I started comforting him, I'm like, 'Listen, weird s***'s happened to me, I'm good, I'll be good, don't worry, thank you,' you know.
"So I was comforting him 'cause he was like, freaked out, and then we got in the car...and my husband's driving, and we're just 'WTF' like the whole way, we're like how, how, how, how?"
Menounos had a grueling 10-hour surgery in February 2023 to remove the cancer, which was thankfully a success. She has credited her early stage II diagnosis and being in tune with her body for helping her beat the disease and encourages others to pay attention to symptoms and take control of their health.
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